Monthly archive: January, 2013

Following ‘year one’ of the Russian Revolution, Antonio Gramsci wrote a piece for the newspaper Il Grido del Popolo [1918] in which he argued that ‘just as a poem exists in the fantasy of the poet before it reaches the printed paper, the advent of social organisation exists in consciousness and will . . . What is demanded is the external, printed paper’. Here, in the crucible of revolutionary processes stretching across Europe, there was a striving towards a realisation and recognition of new organisational and political forms to achieve social transformation. The ‘Modern Prince’, as a qualitatively new form of political party, would become the epithet in the Prison Notebooks given by Gramsci to the revolutionary agent that would transform principles into practice, or consciousness and will into social organisation. A new pamphlet edited by Martin Thomas on Antonio Gramsci: Working-Class Revolutionary and published by Workers’ Liberty raises these questions of political organisation and more. It is well worth reading given the significance of the questions raised and it will go straight onto the reading list of my third-year ‘Gramsci & Global Politics’ module.

This text is the second in the new series Thesis Piecesto be featured on For the Desk Drawer that aims to showcase the outstanding work of my doctoral students, past and present, to a wider audience. This contribution is from Carolina Cepeda commenting on spaces of resistance in Latin America linked to the alter-globalisation movement.

As a third-year PhD student in Political Science at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, I had the opportunity last semester to join the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham as a visiting postgraduate research student. My research focus is on resistances against neoliberalism and their local and global links in Latin America, something really close to the work of many members of the centre. I have been studying about the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and international politics and through that process the work of Adam Morton. As a result, I decided to contact him and we made an appointment to meet at the International Studies Association annual convention in Montreal, 2011.

This text is the first in a new series of posts to be featured on For the Desk Drawer that aims to showcase the outstanding work of my doctoral students, past and present, to a wider audience. The series is called Thesis Piecesand starts with this empirically rich and theoretically nuanced set of insights from Chris Hesketh into the ongoing class struggle and geopolitical dynamic of the Zapatistas in Mexico.

On December 21st, as the nineteenth anniversary of their new year’s day uprising was approaching, 40,000 Zapatistas silently and peacefully occupied 5 key municipal towns across Chiapas, Mexico, to announce the latest phase in their social struggle. This was their first significant public action for years and sought to remind both Mexico and the wider world that they are still very much here, in spite of the lack of media attention.

David Harvey famously opined that Paris was ‘a capital city being shaped by bourgeois power into a city of capital’, hence his focus on the organisation of relations of space in Paris, Capital of Modernity. It is an insight that Victor Serge may well have approved given the writer’s own acute awareness of the spatial order of urban development across not just Paris but also Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Petrograd, Moscow, Marseille and more.

This spatial awareness comes through vividly in Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which also offers a rich and wide array of insights. The book has been recently published in a complete unabridged version by NYRB Classics accompanied by a wonderfully detailed glossary by Richard Greeman. To do justice to this important document in a short blog post would be nearly impossible. Nevertheless, my aim is to tease out some of the detail in the translator Peter Sedgwick’s comment that the book focuses on the ‘degenerescence of revolutions’ without collapsing into some kind of fatalism.

With a characteristic sense of timing, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN: Zapatista Army of National Liberation) marked the resurgence of its social struggle on 21 December 2012. With the beginning of a new Mayan cycle, this date marked the “silent march” of 40,000 members of the Zapatista’s ‘social bases’ across the towns of Palenque, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo and San Cristóbal de las Casas. Their message was one of struggle and resistance in the face of the returning rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). In the initial communiqué on 21 December [click here], the Zapatistas stated ‘Did you listen? It is the sound of your world collapsing. It is the sound of our world resurging’. Given the “silence” of the Zapatistas over the past eighteen months, the “silent march” and the subsequent series of communiqués raises new questions about the struggle for social justice in Mexico and internationally.